


What should be left unsaid

by DrDings (fellSans)



Category: Halo
Genre: Gen, Torture, suicidal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-02
Updated: 2015-04-02
Packaged: 2018-03-20 22:19:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3667332
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fellSans/pseuds/DrDings
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leslie Shen, a.k.a Shen, is a strong member of a team of ODST. Her and her team are dropped onto a planet overrun with Covenant forces. Things don't go as planned and when their drop ship goes down, Shen's men slowly die one by one and she is taken and tortured for information.</p>
            </blockquote>





	What should be left unsaid

                _“LET’S MOVE MEN! GET YOUR ASSES IN GEAR; WE DON’T HAVE THE LUXURY TO HAVE YOU WASTING EVEN A NANO-SECOND’S WORTH OF TIME!”  
Fire and craters dotted the broken city landscape where a troupe of ODST landed. Wrecked pods of all denominations of carnage sat in the craters in various states of disarray and the handful of ODST troupers assigned to the mission slowly got themselves out. _

_The troupe of ODST ran through the streets with Covenant soldiers on their asses. Four Brutes, a slew of Jackals and a hell of an amount of Grunts all chasing them with the intent to kill wouldn’t take no for an answer. Grenade fire exploded around them and two Hunters roared into existence as they rounded a corner. Each step they took to try and escape, more enemies swamped them, swarming like bugs until escape looked like a fools dream._

_All around her, Shen’s men were dying one at a time; time itself seemed to be at a standstill. Each valiant soldier she knew falling to the electrical hailstorm of the Hunter’s cannons and the plasma grenades raining shrapnel down on them. Bright orange spiker spikes dotted the bleeding corpse of another squad member and another looked like a mangled doll with his legs twisted at wrong angles to the rest of his body. Shen found the only decent piece of cover there was for the time being and shot short bursts of fire out at several of the Grunts throwing the grenades. One of her men placed a well-aimed shot that took out one of the hunters but only one domino falling made no difference in the slaughter. He suddenly exploded in a spattering of warm blood and organs with shrapnel from his armour scattering everywhere. Shen caught most of the blast and her armour had his guts caked on it now, she wiped her visor off and lobbed a stolen plasma grenade over the wall she crouched behind, nailing a Brute in the ass before it exploded in a shower of black guts._

_Rain poured down in droves on the bloodied streets where Shen sat cowering in a hole, avoiding the fire from Covenant weapons. Everyone around her already died in horrific manners and it was up to her to get out. It was a hailstorm out there, every few seconds grenades exploded around her as they tried clearing out every last hunk of rubble that could hide the ODST. She barely held on in that tiny hole, her cracked and damaged armour doing her almost no good. Needler and spiker spikes dotted one of her arms rendering it useless and grit caked her eyes, making it hard to see. Smoke filled the area quickly which Shen needed for cover but each blessing in battle came with a price. She couldn’t see her enemies either which would make it hell for her to do damn near anything. Screams from the Covenant forces pierced the deafening noises of grenade fire and other weaponry, screams of triumph and conquest. The two giant slabs of concrete Shen hid under shifted slightly; she swore and tried to move. A Brute grabbed her leg. Shen screamed in anger and tried to blast the fucker in the head but nothing happened. The SMG she picked up earlier made the one noise no one wants to hear, the tell tail click click click of having no ammo. She then tried to nail the bastard in the face with the butt of the gun but the giant Brute held her far enough away. Under his own helmet the Brute smirked at Shen sending shivers down her spine and dropped his elbow onto her head, cracking the last shreds of her helmet off. The force was enough to jar her into a shock and the Brute cracked her upside the head again, fully knocking her out. Last thing she heard before darkness took over was a triumphant ‘Nighty Night’._

_Flashes of bright white and murky red light danced across Shen’s eyes, she floated in a primordial soup of darkness for what seemed like her whole lifetime and infinitely more of them. Weird voices spoke in harsh tones around her and she didn’t know what was happening to her. Everything seemed to be moving in clips, like a movie that skips and jumps because of ruined data. Nothing made sense to her, she knew she wasn’t dead but at the same time she accepted the fact that she was and was now floating in some sort of hell or purgatory. Her body felt limp and she couldn’t move, her head lolled on her neck like some dead weight and no voice came to her aid._

_Darkness engulfed her. She no longer felt limp but darkness engulfed her, mind body and soul. Shen sat in this chair, wearing nothing she hardly noted because the strange material felt cold against her and her grimy skin slightly stuck to it. In her mind she tried to figure out what happened but everything was a haze. Clouds filled her head and made every thought she had nearly impossible to grab, the threads of ideas too fast for her to catch. Nothing seemed real any more. The darkness of her mind seemed comforting and more real than the hell she sat in. Shen tried moving but found her body bound to whatever she sat in with hardened cuffs surrounding her limbs and belly. She knew they were crude though compared to ‘normal’ equipment because she could feel how rough and slightly sharp some of the surfaces were. Footsteps approached from somewhere, she didn’t dare open her eyes but she knew it was one of the Covenant fuckers that apparently captured her. Unfortunately the thing that stood in front of her didn’t like her eyes being closed and forced them open against her will. Shen tried everything in her power to keep them closed but failed now finally getting a look at where she was. The room they had her in looked like some schizo’s nightmare fuel. It had all the trimmings to be some sort of medical torcher chamber with machines of all shapes and size lining one wall, another wall filled to the brim with all sorts of horrendous tools that did god knows what and another wall decorated with bits of rotten flesh and dangling bones. The floors and walls looked to be some sort of plastic like material in a dark almost metallic looking grey with a permanent ooze of multi colored blood and gore caked on. Shen wanted to puke but nothing came up when her stomache heaved and whatever it was that was in the room with her gave a harsh raspy sound that could only be laughter. The thing still held her eyes open before it let go of one to take out a series of thin, long needles. It gave her a sick, twisted smirk before it slid two of the needles through her eyelids and into the flesh of her forehead before imbedding them into her skull. All Shen could do was scream in pain as her eyelids were now nailed open._

_Time meant nothing. All that ever was and ever would be was nothing more than times when Shen was awake to be tortured. Sessions lasted for hours and each session was different then the last. There were times when Shen had each of her boobs pierced by large spikes and then gauged like ear piercings with larger spikes until they had nearly two an’ a half inches of hole going through the top and bottom. Other times they took a special sand blaster type apparatus filled with a tiny acidic particulate as sharp as razor blades and blasted sections of her legs skin off just to see what open muscle did when exposed to the horrible dirty air around it. Today was no different, a machine sat in front of Shen’s bloodied and broken, but still alive, form. Shen sat on the chair, restrained as usual, her dry eyes pinned open to see everything happening. The thing who kept doing all these things to her plunged a needle into her arm, shooting her with what she could only describe was a shot of adrenaline and started fiddling with a few of the controls of the blocky machine in front of her. A few seconds later, Shen felt the surge of adrenaline in her veins that kept her alive and conscious for these procedures and watched in horror as the thing pressed a button on the side of the chair. It shifted so that she rose up about three to four feet taller than she was sitting down and her legs slowly spread apart against her will. Shen tried everything in her power to force the chair closed again but to no avail, it didn’t do anything she wanted and she ‘sat’ suspended, spread open and naked in front of this thing. Her eyes showed every bit of terror she felt and she knew what he was going to do with her, if they couldn’t get her to talk with pain, they’d break her some other way. Another wicked, twisted grin appeared on the thing’s face as it attached a large drill bit like attachment to the top of the machine it set up and slowly placed it under Shen’s twitching body. Tears leaked from her face and she silently screamed through the bite block they forcibly installed in her mouth to keep her from tearing the thing’s fingers off. The front end of the device looked every bit as pointy and sharp as one would expect a drill to be and with a flick of a switch did just what it looked like it would do too. With a slow and painful twist of a knob on the side, the arm of the machine slowly ascended to kiss Shen’s lower lips. She cringed and choked back a silent sob as it started to push forward, shredding all in its wake. A scream finally pierced through the gloopy din just as the machine pierced through into her womb._

_Days, months, years? Shen didn’t know how long she stayed strapped to that chair and she didn’t care anymore. Everything blurred together so much that she couldn’t even tell you how long a second was any more. You expected her body to be beyond fixing at this point but in that supposed adrenaline shot they always gave her, something prevented her body from decaying. Pain was all they wanted for her, pain to break her and break her they did. Luckily, she didn’t tell those Covenant bastards anything that the UNSC had going on though they tried everything in their power to weasel it out of her. Outside of Shen’s mind, two months passed since her capture by the enemy and search parties already stopped looking by week four. Too many good men died that fateful day and they didn’t want to risk any more. The thing stood in front of Shen as it always did and injected the woman with another shot before dragging over a large apparatus that looked like a spherical shaped series of rings each with their own needles attached. Her pale blue eyes widened in fear as they usually did now and she struggled weakly against her bonds. As per the regiment the thing twistedly smirked at her and said nothing, only bringing the apparatus closer to Shen so that it encompassed the chair and her completely. With another few flicks of a few different switches, the apparatus started closing in on itself, lowering the needles toward Shen slowly. The chair turned itself around and opened up so that her arms and legs now suspended her, exposing her whole body to the machine. The thing suddenly pressed another button shoving all the needles at once into Shen’s body. She, as usual, silently screamed in agony._

_Another week passed without any major incident. Shen barely had any scrap of herself left any more to hold onto and she mentally begged to die. It would be a far greater mercy than to let her live and relive this torture every day of her life. The thing had already destroyed everything that made her a woman, reducing her to a genderless pig for the slaughter, gave her piercings in places that ought not have any, blasted her skin away before re-growing it and doing it all over again and many many other things Shen couldn’t even remember any more. Somehow, this day out of all the others felt like it would be different, worse in fact and Shen sat on the table with a sense of foreboding and dread. The thing somberly walked up to jab the usual injection into Shen’s neck and this time he didn’t even look like he was having any sort of fun like usual. It grabbed a pair of what looked like old fashioned wire cutters and snipped the long protruding bits of metal that held her eyelids open short before slowly pulling them out with another ancient looking tool. She didn’t even flinch at the feeling of the cold, painful metal sliding out of bones, flesh and skin, the wound bled but she didn’t feel the blood that ran twin rivulets into her eyes, staining her vision red._

_A machine of a different breed than the others rolled into the room by another Covenant thing, fitted with spikes with wires connecting them, a large battery like thing attached to those wires and a million setting dials. For the first time in her known life, and months here, she didn’t know how to process this. It looked like an electroshock device from an ancient movie she’d seen once when she was a young recruit and her and her squad found em buried in an old archive. She was correct in her assumption as the thing turned the device on and it started to come alive. The tell tail hum of electricity surged through the air as the thing came back from his tool rack with a sharp, serrated knife. All Shen could do as it started to slice through the skin and flesh on her skull was stare in a bloody horror at the skin and muscle that flopped in front of her face. Shen felt all of it, the pain of the serrated tines tearing her flesh from her bones. Shen felt the edges of her consciousness start to blur as the blood poured from the shaved section of her skull. The thing continued to carve away half of her flesh and skin from her skull until the bone sat exposed to the air covering the size of half a dinner plate. Another shot of the adrenaline mixture stuff started to course through her veins and unconsciousness slowly faded bringing her back to the realm of conscious and aware._

_Next thing she knew, the thing had taken the serrated knife back into his hand and unscrewed a cap on the end, revealing a long thin pick like apparatus. It jabbed the thing into her skull over and over again in a circle around where the bone was exposed, careful to keep the brain from turning into mush. Shen blankly stared ahead wide eyed, numb and reeling from what she surmised they’d be doing to her. Her knuckles where white where her hands gripped the arms of the plastic chair she sat in. As soon as the thing finished sawing her bone off her brain, it grabbed the set of spikes with insulated gloves and shoved each and every one of the five spikes into her brain slowly. The amount of electricity flowing through her brain from the machine was just enough to keep her brain functioning while “it” fine-tuned the shock settings. The shock machine looked like it was set to the highest pain setting and one that would pulse the shocks every three seconds. These had enough power in them to kill a Grunt easily but to a human, who knew what would happen and that’s what ‘it’ wanted to know. Shen had finally run her course through usefulness and this was the last of the line for her, it was now a 'you will not live' session. With the press of another button on the chair, metal plates surfaced to contact with different bits of her body to force the electricity to flow through her._

_The session so far, lasted an hour with Shen’s brain and body frying. In the room, it smelled of burning flesh, hair and bodily fluids, sounds of sizzling meat and screams filled the air. Anyone passing by knew what was happening and turned a blind eye to the torture. Shen couldn’t even form a cohesive thought anymore; everything from her basic brain processes to her pain receptors was overloaded from the shocks administered.  This form of death was slow, extremely painful and would render the body useless for further study after death; no one would know that she died in the Covenant’s worst torture chamber. Another ten minutes passed before anything happened. The hallways stayed eerily silent for a while and the thing put his PADD down to see what was going on. Shen’s eyes rolled back in her head for the billionth time and another scream tore through the silence that encompassed the hallway. A few minutes passed without the thing coming back but Shen couldn’t even think to wonder what happened. Another minute ticked by slowly before anything else happened, a large explosion rocked through the hallway, sending smoke and bits of debris billowing into the room. Not soon after the explosion, a towering Spartan walked through the door and trashed the machine. Shen could weep, someone had come to save her but all she wanted was death. Her dry, burned mouth opened and all she could say was “Kill me.”_  
In a fierce, near protective manner, the Spartan replied. “Not today sweetcheeks.”  
  
Shen blacked out.

Shen woke up with a gut wrenching scream, sweat drenching her bare body, her thin sheets clinging to her slim frame. Her stark, piercing blue eyes wildly looked around her room as she did everything in her power to strangle her pillow. No one came to tell her to stop killing the thing she slept on or to tell her it was only a nightmare. It took five minutes before she calmed down enough to start breathing normally, nightmares, it was all nightmares. It would only ever be nightmares from now till the day she got out of this god forsaken life. Her mind was never a peaceful thing anymore, images of what happened to her wormed their way in in snippets, tiny flashes of images that leave her thrashing and this time was no exception. Shen lay on her meager hospital bed sobbing and tried to pull her hair out, they weren’t going away, they weren’t going away… She thrashed herself against the plush bed, slamming against it. They weren’t going away, they weren’t going away, they weren’t………………

A doctor came and slid a needle into her arm, dosing her with a sedative that put the broken woman back into a thoughtless sleep.

**Author's Note:**

> A.N: This is something I've wanted to write up for a long time for my character Shen, she was tortured and its part of her character when she is introduced into the story. This isn't meant to be anything too plot related and all of the italics are flashbacks, scenes she sees in her dream. And yes I know that most of what happens to her probably would kill her but there are ways in my headcannon that Covenant has secret ways to heal any damages dealt to people like that. Anyways, hoped you liked it!


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